


in his own strength

by mimesere



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, edtjelvar week 2021
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:01:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28971000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimesere/pseuds/mimesere
Summary: All Ed wants is to be useful.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22
Collections: EdTjelvar Week 2021





	in his own strength

**Author's Note:**

> For Ed Tjelvar Week 2021, day 3: Family

It’s not that Ed is ungrateful. He’s very grateful. The Tahans are very kind -- mostly kind, but Ed remembers being Ishak and Ismail’s ages and he hadn’t been particularly kind then either, and he hadn’t been kidnapped or dropped back into everything being different or lived through everything being different, so he mostly tries to help where he can. Sometimes that means letting Ishak teach him spells which mostly don’t work for him, but every now and then what Apollo wants matches up with whatever mood Ishak’s in and they muddle through. Sometimes they run instead and Ed teaches Ishak how to throw a punch and the best places to kick someone. 

“Running’s the important bit, though,” Ed tells him. 

Ishak flings himself down in the shade. “I don’t _want_ to run away.”

“Well no, it’s not very satisfying,” Ed says. “But it’s dead useful.”

“You don’t run away,” Ishak says. “Vesseek doesn’t. Or Emeke. Why--”

“I did though,” Ed says. He’d run like anything, run and hid from a pack of the invisible dog things in Rome and wanted to die of shame from it. He hadn’t died of shame though. Or from being clawed to bits. Or from the fever that followed being clawed almost to bits, when he’d hidden in one of the buildings and prayed and prayed and hadn’t died, so probably Apollo hadn’t minded the running or the hiding.

He’d run an awful lot in Rome. He wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night and it takes a minute to remember he’s not being hunted anymore. Then he has to breathe carefully and stretch or meditate until the rest of him remembers that he doesn’t have to run or fight and that he’s not hungry. He’s safe. 

Ed tries not to feel shame about that either. There’s a letter from the temple in Vienna that’s told him to stay where he is because there’s no one closer that has the time for him, so he is because he’s trying very hard to do what he’s been told since the last time he didn’t he’d ended up alone in Rome and he still doesn’t know what happened to Friedrich. Apollo’s still there when Ed reaches for him, so none of it had been bad enough to break his oaths. And all of that means that he shouldn’t feel badly about it, but he does. He’d run from evil and he’d been afraid and he’d been alone and a paladin wasn’t supposed to be any of that.

But Ishak doesn’t believe him about the running and it is important, so Ed tells him about Rome, his mouth dry the whole time. It’s awful. He feels cracked open and raw when he does it and he hates it, but Ishak looks like he understands and doesn’t complain about running after that and before he goes back to his proper tutor, he pats Ed on the arm and says he’s sorry. Ed doesn’t know for what, but he smiles and promises to show Ishak how to throw someone bigger than he is tomorrow and that seems to shake him of his funny mood.

Ed doesn’t know what to do after that, so he runs some more and practices his forms and tries to remember what they all did during training so he can fill in all the empty hours until the next meal. 

And that’s...pretty much how it goes. The Tahans are mostly very kind like Ed hadn’t actually known people like his family could be and there are servants everywhere like he remembers growing up with and he’s given everything he asks for without having to do much of anything at all. 

Saira thanks him for helping with Ishak and asks him how he’s doing. He mumbles that Ishak is really very strong for his size and that he’s fine and it’s not a _lie_ if he just doesn’t say that he’s bored. Ishak looks at him a little funny sometimes, but seems willing enough to learn what Ed can teach him -- where to kick, where to hit, how to fall. Sometimes he even tries meditating, but he fidgets something awful and Ed remembers doing that too. Ismail is a little better at it, which doesn’t help when the two of them are snapping at each other, but mostly Ismail leaves them alone. The guards turn him away politely but firmly and escort him back to his very generous guest quarters. The gardeners let him help sometimes, but only when he finds them in the morning before everyone else is up.

Mostly he just feels useless.

* * *

When Ed is just twenty, he punches the visiting Honorable Somebody Unimportant hard enough to break his nose. His hand hurts after and he misses all the dancing, which he does feel bad about because he likes dancing and no one local expects him to talk about anything serious while they’re waiting. 

His father tries to make him apologize, but Ed won’t and says he’d do it again besides and his father frowns and his mother sighs and his oldest brother calls him a brute but Mrs. Meedham brings him a cold cloth for his hand and tells him he did well.

The betrothal is called off, of course, and Ed does apologize for that even though he’d still have gone through with it.

“You realize he is my cousin?” Helena asks. She is tall and blonde and she tells Ed exactly what she wants from him. He thinks they’d have gotten on well enough. 

Ed hunches in his seat, clasping his hands between his knees. “Ah, no, not as such.” Mostly he’d realized that the Honorable Cousin had his hands on Alice, the parlour maid whose brother tended the dogs, and he hadn’t thought much of it past that.

“Would it have mattered if you had known?”

Ed shakes his head. She sits down next to him and pats his hand absently. “Edward. I need a partner with discretion. You do understand, don’t you?” 

Ed nods. As far as Ed could tell, discretion really only meant not doing things that needed doing or doing them so that no one else knew they’d been done. He didn’t much hold with all that.

Later, his younger sister finds him banished to his rooms and settles herself on his bed. “Bad tactics, Eddie,” she tells him patiently. “You could have thrashed him in the stables and no one would have been the wiser.”

“Discretion,” he says glumly and she nods.

He has to stay home when the rest of the family goes to London for the Assembly and all the parties and such, but he doesn’t mind so much when the weather turns nicer and he can spend hours and hours outside wandering the grounds. A cleric of Hermes comes around and he stops by the estate to consult with the steward before going out to help with the calving and the lambing. He stays for weeks and weeks, until the last of the spring lambs is delivered. He plays music and lets Ed follow him around and tells Ed what to do to help and at the end, he talks Ed through delivering one of the last lambs but Ed gets to do it all and it’s the happiest he’s been in a while. 

They wash up in the cold and the dark. Ed barely feels it, still floating on the feeling of having helped and the warm press of the cleric’s hand on his shoulder and the low-voiced, “Well done, Edward,” contributes to Ed’s bubbling sense of happiness. The hot press of his mouth against Ed’s and his cold fingers against the skin of Ed’s back are all part of it too, and so is the breathless, giddy aftermath when the cleric’s dog lets out a long sigh and Ed’s too tired to stop himself laughing at how put out she sounds.

A cleric of Demeter comes round after that, blessing the wheat and the barley and potatoes. Ed invites her back for supper before he remembers he’s been sneaking into the kitchen for his meals instead of at the table proper and he hopes it doesn’t get back to his parents that he’s been doing that. She doesn’t seem to mind and he follows her as she tromps around from farm to farm and field to field in very sensible boots and she asks him questions about crop rotations and fallow fields and then looks a little disappointed at his answers. 

He offers to get the steward if she wants, but she just shakes her head. “It’s all right,” she says. “I just wondered if you felt that pull.” But she lets the subject drop and tells him about beets instead.

The tenant farmers like her tremendously. Ed does too. She’s brisk and she has lines around her mouth and eyes like she smiles a lot. She clasps her hands behind her back when she bends over to peer at the seedlings the gardeners are growing in the orangery. She pats him on the cheek before she leaves and says she’ll see him next year.

She doesn’t.

* * *

The twins try to make him promise not to say anything to their mother or their sister after Ed heals Ismail’s broken wrist. Ed does not promise but does try to avoid talking to anyone in the family until everything blows over, but that lasts about a day before he’s called into Saira’s office to find Saira and Hawaa both waiting for him.

“Edward, please sit.” Saira says. She sounds tired. Ed does sit down and takes a deep breath, making sure to sit up straight and look attentive. 

They look at him expectantly. Ed shifts around in the chair a bit. 

“You healed Ismail,” Hawaa finally says. 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

She smiles faintly. “What foolishness was he attempting that required healing from a paladin?”

The problem is that Ed doesn’t know exactly. Ishak had found him in the garden and had been so breathless with tears that Ed hadn’t actually asked any questions, just followed him to where Ismail was pale and shaking, sitting on the ground and holding his arm close to his chest. He hadn’t thought about it at all, just taken Ismail’s hand and asked Apollo to help Ismail feel better.

He tells them so. “Did I do wrong?” he asks tentatively. He doesn’t think he did but this is one of those places where maybe there are rules he doesn’t know. 

Saira sighs and he wishes he could take it back. “You did wonderfully, Edward. Thank you for helping him.”

Ed nods and looks down at his hands. Very, very distantly, the thought that Rome had been _simple_ bobs up to the surface.


End file.
